Water Quantity & Quality

Category Archives: Asia

Katherine Ellen Foley on the problem with “clean” hydropower. “Globally, the reservoirs created by dams may actually contribute almost a gigaton of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions—about 25% more than they had previously thought. This means that we’ve almost certainly been underestimating how much greenhouse gas we’ve been shooting into the atmosphere.”

Another reason to let rivers run their natural course….too late to stop China’s 3 River Dam on Yangtze.

Hanako the elephant, who has been called the world’s saddest elephant has passed away after spending 60 years in a tiny cell at Inokashira Park Zoo in Japan.

She was 69 years old.

In the six decades Hanako spent in her cell, she never got to feel soft grass or dirt under her feet, or the bark of trees with her trunk, and worst of all, she hadn’t seen another elephant for most of her adult life….”

“But a full cleanup of the site — including the extraction of melted uranium fuel from the damaged reactor cores — is expected to take at least 40 years according to the government’s timetable and a century by other estimates. In the meantime, officials acknowledge, Fukushima remains vulnerable.”

” Experts say the impeachment and criminal charges are the latest attempt by the country’s royalist elite, and its army-backers, to nullify the political influence of the Shinawatras, whose parties have won every election since 2001.”

“Worried about the amount of trash on our coasts? Do gyres of bobbing plastic whirl through your head each night? Help wipe these worries from your mind and the beach by joining the International Coastal Cleanup on September 21, 2013.

With more than 550,000 volunteers scouring beaches, rivers, and lakes last year, this event is the biggest one-day cleanup of marine debris in the world. In the past, volunteers have turned up everything from bottle caps and plastic bags to toilet seats and cyborg sea-kitties. But each year cigarette butts take home the prize for most common item of debris found on the beach, with 2,117,931 of these toxic pieces of plastic turning up during the 2012 global cleanup alone.

To volunteer at a location near you, visit Ocean Conservancy online. The NOAA Marine Debris Program is a proud sponsor of the annual event, and last year NOAA volunteers cleaned up more than 2.8 tons (nearly 5,700 pounds) of debris from waterways and beaches in DC, Seattle, and Oahu.

Even if you can’t make it to your nearest waterway on September 21, you can still help reduce how much trash makes it to the ocean by planning your own beach cleanup and considering these 10 suggestions from Ocean Conservancy.”

Gu Yongqiang explores the technology of remediation, quality of water and rivers, and the will of the people and politicians to make their waters “Boatable, fishable swimmable, drinkable” again. From my studies on the IJC and other organizations the key ingredient to getting anything done in politics is political will. This is lacking with many macro goals, e.g., finding clean energy, prevention of starvation worldwide, elevating the quality of life for many suffering in the world today, providing clean drinking water around the world. Here is a blurb from Tim Haab and a link to “In China You Don’t Dare Swim in much less Drink the Water” by Gu Yongqiang / Beijing.

Tim Haab writes:

Boatable, fishable, swimmable, drinkable?

Local environmentalists say that China has enough money and technological prowess to clean up its rivers. The missing ingredient for an environmental campaign? Official motivation. Local governments depend on polluting factories to buoy local economies; local bureaucrats know their promotions are contingent on keeping growth rates high. Still, Chinese citizens are no longer sated simply by economic advancement and have taken to Weibo to express their dissatisfaction.